Is This My Fate?
by Still Bullet
Summary: That sinper was finally down, and Alyx and Gordon could move on and get the hell out of City 17 before the Citadel blew. But that sound...Alyx couldn't stop thinking about it... One-Shot


_Wow, I can't believe it on this one! I did this all yesterday, in about two hours--that's a record for me, because I take days, sometimes even months just to write one story! I guess you can credit all of the people that inspired me to write this, mainly Spartan-IV :D_

_Anywho, this is an idea I've had since I got Garry's Mod in early February. It's a little different than I originally planned, but that's ok!  
I read "Enlightenment" over again a few days ago, and I realized that I drifted away from that writing style a bit, but not purposely. People really liked it (and I did too--I personally love that story), so I tried to use that same kind of narration again. Hopefully you'll like it like people did with "Enlightenment"!_

**_Based on: Half-Life 2: Episode One (Valve) Ha, surprised you, didn't I? A story that's not based on just Half-Life 2 XD  
Rating: K+ should do. Nothing so bad here.  
Author's Notes: This takes place after you take out that sniper with the roller mines. I know this doesn't happen in game--Alyx doesn't seem lost at all--but I thought I should try the idea out here since this is a scene that everyone knows about; creating a scene from scratch just wouldn't progress the same feeling--that's what I think, at least._**

_--_

Alyx hoped that she wasn't the only one who heard that. She really hoped that she just wasn't going crazy or misheard something. She wasn't talking about Gordon, no, although what he did to kill that sniper was pretty clever. She was already used to the sound of roller mines…uh…rolling around, since, after all, Dog's ball was just that only deactivated, and the sound they made while electrocuting some poor soul. Those were already permanently embedded into her head—when you meet danger, the sound it makes usually doesn't leave you. But she really couldn't have heard what she thought she heard. There was just no way. It wasn't possible, it shouldn't be possible.

Footsteps trampled that thought now. Who was running, anyway? Oh wait, that was her. She must have been so stuck in her thoughts that she forgot what she was doing. What was she doing, anyway?  
Gordon's stern face then reminded her at that moment. Those piercing eyes were enough to force her to recall the memory of what she was doing just a second ago.

"Nice job, Gordon. That sniper almost took my head off," she managed to say, holstering her gun and tossing her hands around, as she usually did. Gordon just nodded as a response. His suit seemed to be covered with blood, some of his own, most of it the disgusting yellow blood of antlions and headcrabs, the rest of it from the zombies that filled the underground and from the Combine above it. He always made his job look easy, even though it was always obvious that it wasn't and probably never would be. Alyx thought she heard his suit listing out its complaints after the sound of a discharging sniper rifle had broken the silence of City Seventeen before.  
By silence she meant the never-ending echoes of gunfire and random alarms, with an occasional sound of a car burning rubber on the street.  
Just a little proof to show that his job _wasn't_ easy.

The hell was Barney, anyway?

"Let me climb up and take a look at what we're walking into," she told Gordon. He just stood there, those thick-rimmed glasses now shinning way too brilliantly from the damn sun that kept blinding them all of the time. Gravity gun in hand, never looking like he'll put it down, way, way, _way _too much paranoia in his mind to let him do that.  
But that sound still bothered her. Even more than the condition of that blood-covered Gordon in front of her, who probably had his circulatory system running on morphine by now.  
Gordon didn't seem to act like he heard it. Then again, how would she know if he did? He probably didn't care about the sound of death anymore. This was just like Black Mesa all over again to him, only in some city he's probably never heard of before with some kind of a human-like alien race that felt like swallowing Earth for their own purposes. He never talked, anyway. She basically just figured out if he was ok or not by the fact that he was still standing.

She just wanted to ignore the thought of it—for now, at least. Just go on up, scan the area, steal the rifle and use it to get the ladder down for Gordon, move on, hup-two-three-four, find Barney, we're out of here. That all she wanted to do right now. Forget about the sound.

Anyway. Back to reality. She carefully grabbed each plank as she pulled and pushed herself up. To the top of that weird wooden structure now, that's it, stand on the top of it and hope you don't fall, slip into the window now and hope there's nothing else in there. The last thing she'd want was for a zombie to come on out and tear the skin on her face right off.  
"Uh-oh."  
Crap, a wall. Soldiers, antlions, random pits, destruction…that's City Seventeen for you. She changed her vision back to the stern-faced Gordon, hair now covered in the ash that fell from the sky.  
"They've got the street fortified up ahead." Tell him the whole deal, get out of here and keep moving. "You run point, ok? I'll cover you up here 'til you reach the far end."  
Wait, wasn't she just telling herself this entire time that she'd leave _right now?  
_But she could help Gordon a _lot _better with that sniper rifle, instead of clogging the way of the narrow hallways of the apartment buildings around here.

…if her skills weren't as rusty as she thought they were.

She snagged it anyway, one of her hazel eyes staring right through the scope, finger holding tightly around the trigger.

"I might be a little rusty with the rifle," she thought aloud, repeating what she was just thinking about before. Line up the blue laser, pull the trigger…_BAM!  
__CLICK!_

"Ha, nope! Guess I'm not!"  
Wow. She got that ladder down in one try. Gordon didn't seem too amazed, though. He just had the same expression Alyx had at the moment—let's speed it up, get out of here.

Ahh, zombies. The stupid-pieces-of-crap-who-won't-seem-to-leave-them-alone poured out from corners of the building, their moans sounding as though they were some kind of exclamations being said backwards. Then there were the Zombine—wow, she couldn't believe she actually called it that lame joke again—that loved to skip around while holding up a grenade in the air as though it would do something—  
Oh crap. That _was_ a grenade that just exploded, wasn't it? Concentrate, Alyx, get yourself a couple of headshots and clear anything that gets in Gordon's way, or whatever _will _get in his way. Line up the blue laser, squeeze the trigger, _BAM, _zombie down. Wow. She didn't even realize how powerful these rifles were—she just knocked the headcrab clear off of that zombie. In fact, it slid a few feet ahead of its used-to-be-host before it skidded to a stop.

Before she knew it, her mind went into some kind of auto-pilot mode and cleared out half of the zombies—the other half Gordon had mowed down with some bullets from a shotgun with no second thoughts. He turned his direction and rounded the corner, and ran out of sight by the time Alyx blinked.

Then a thought occurred to her.  
Other than the sound.

When Gordon killed that sniper—which was when she heard it—she never did see a corpse come flying out. Was it still in here?  
Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh _god_. If that sound was what she thought it was, then the source was probably still in here.  
She didn't want to look. She didn't want to turn her head around. She just wanted to keep her attention on the road ahead of her, wait and see where Gordon comes out and help him if he needs it, then run like hell before the Citadel blew it.  
But she couldn't help herself. That one little spot in her head just couldn't stop wondering. She _had _to find out if her thoughts about the sound were right.

A sigh, a wince, and then the change of direction the hazel eyes were looking. Couldn't see anything. Turning her head, now…turning her body, now. Slipping her finger off of the trigger, pulling her body away from the rifle…  
Oh god.  
It was.

There it laid—there _she _laid—the corpse of a Combine sniper. It was female. _Oh my god_, it was _female_. This entire time, these past twenty years, Alyx has never, _never_ seen a female Combine before. She's never even _heard_ of one. But to see one lying right there…it felt like Doctor Breen himself just drove a knife right through her skull and out the back.  
She couldn't believe it. That sound she heard _was _what she though it was the entire time—a screaming female. It couldn't have been a rebel because its voice was robotic, but not like that random computer voice she kept hearing throughout the Citadel and other times in City Seventeen and around it before the Citadel's reactor blew, before the chaos happened, before someone, just one man, just Freeman, decided to take a stand and change _everything_.

Alyx stared deeply into the eye of the female Combine's helmet. It reminded her of the Combine Elite—white outfit, Cyclops-styled helmet—she always thought the Elite looked stupid because of it—boots, the usual deal when it came to the Combine. Big heels that looks like it would _seriously _hurt if you were kicked by them, nice n' long gloves, two pistols holstered on either side of her belt, the Combine's logo drifting somewhere on her outfit…  
Alyx couldn't help but stare into that one eye of the mask. It was the color of some kind of orange and red mixed with each other, with a little bit of yellow thrown in to make the color less harsh. It was warm—the color itself reminded her of the golden hour.

She soon felt a sick pain kick itself into her stomach. Was this her fate? Is this what would've happened to her when she was captured, brought the Citadel, left in that pod forever until she was brought out to see her doom lie before her? If Doctor Mossm…Judith hadn't stepped in and stopped them, and if Breen hadn't thought of sending her father and she through that portal, would she be that corpse right there? Maybe not, considering how Gordon needed her help, back there. But…geeze, and she was worried about becoming a Stalker. But actually fighting with the Combine, actually _killing _the people who just wanted to take their planet back…

_FLING!  
__CRACK!  
__POW!_

The sudden blasts of noises made Alyx snap her attention back to the rifle. She could make out a faint orange blur in the walkway suspended between the two buildings ahead of her, wooden planks flinging off of the shattered windows.

Gordon.

…and some zombies.

Alyx repositioned herself so that she was ready to help Gordon out again. Line up the lazer, _BAM_, zombie down, rinse, lather, repeat. Or uhh…aim, wait for it to recharge, bam, you're dead.

And there he went again; that orange blur carried itself out of her sight before she had a chance to figure out where the hell it was going.  
Like Gordon knew.

Alyx made a quick gaze at the female Combine again. It looked like an assassin to her, of some kind or another.  
So that's what she would be if she worked for the Combine. An assassin.  
By the looks of it, the assassin was nimble, having a lithe and surprisingly curvy body. You know, for having that armor on and everything. She was probably smart too, with an itchy trigger finger, since she seemed to shoot at anything that moved, before. But so did the rest of the snipers. Hell, they shoot freaking _flies_.

There goes the blur again—attention snapped back to the current situation. Alyx carefully watched as Gordon did some kind of random crap with his gravity gun—wait, his? No, it wa—_is_ her father's gravity gun! Although, by the looks of it, Gordon seemed to have adopted it as his own…  
Back to what she was saying. Gordon removed some kind of sheet metal from a wooden structure, revealing a Combine hailing down bullets on the antlions that poured out from the streets on Gordon's level. Alyx easily understood what Gordon wanted her to do, and before the Combine could even figure out what the hell that orange figure was, it fell straight off the structure and onto the pavement, a bullet adding itself to that back of its new outfit for the afterlife. Gordon continued on, and Alyx watched as a segment of the Combine wall/blockade/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it ahead of him opened up and let a group of Combine come out with bullets eager to ask the questions. She sniped some of them down, while Gordon got the rest—same as usual. The wall closed up, and Gordon took shelter at the corner of it and some building, quickly shoving a new magazine into his pistol. The walls opened up again—Alyx made a quick laugh to herself as she watched the Combine run straight ahead and past Gordon. More gunfire, both friendly and not, and the hero managed to keep himself standing in the end.

Gordon ran in, and Alyx was relieved to know that he had finally, _finally _made it to the end. Thank god. Now all _she _had to do was get the hell out of there.

She turned around and walked over to the window, about to pull herself out until something tugged at her mind again.  
Oh no. She didn't want to look at that assassin again. She sure as hell did _not _want to think about it again. But she couldn't help it. Again.  
One last time, hazel eyes met with the still-glowing one-eyed mask of the female Combine. What was she doing? The assassin was dead; Gordon was waiting, time to get out of there.

That's exactly what she did. She hastily jumped from beam to beam until she had reached the ground, went up the ladder, jumped down, and took the path the orange blur had, her own pistol held tightly in her hands, now.

Sure as hell not going back _there_ again.

The only thing she could now think of at the moment is how freaking pissed she would be if Barney was dead.

…and that cat.

--

_I kind of made Gordon sound like the tough, "I don't care about you so I'll just contiunously hit you with a crowbar" type of player, here. Funny, since I'm actually the big sap kind of player who will play through the same area over and over again until everyone in my squad lives._

_And yeah, that's it. Just wanted to experiment with this idea. And the assassin, even though she's dead. Originally I planned on having her alive and Alyx running into her in another ones of their "let me get the cool weapon while you run ahead and have 'fun'" adventures, but I ditched that idea, since Alyx could think more. Hope you enjoyed it!_


End file.
